Yitao Zhu Y5
Parking Rectory Farm The pandemic renewed an emphasis on parks’ benefits for the health of the city and exposed the vexing financial crisis they are facing. Under this background, the project starts as a critique of the typology of public parks and argues for a reconceptualization of ‘park’. Understanding ‘park’ as a verb instead of a noun shifts the focus from creating segregated and enclosed landscapes, to applying ‘park-ish’ spatial qualities to urban spaces.
Rectory Farm is an abandoned agricultural land near Heathrow. In 2017, Hounslow Council approved a proposal to excavate the minerals, replace them with underground warehouses, and cover the site with a new park. Questioning whether a park in conventional sense is suitable for the site, the project envisages an alternative to the existing proposal for Rectory Farm. A new landscape blends the three crucial elements of the area: logistics industry, suburban housings, and natural environment, and encourages richer interactions between the three.
The artificial nature of this landscape, and the inclusion of both the industrial and the residential provide challenges and opportunities to integrate nature with services. The greenspace, embedded with service systems that deal with ventilation, lighting and thermal comfort, becomes the fundamental infrastructures enabling a park-ish urban life.
